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The reason for this paucity of documents is also plain enough. “The antidote to the scorpion’s bite,” to use a patristic figure of speech[41], was felt by the early Church to be the actual cautery, and its leaders spared no pains to rout out and burn the writings of the heretics pending the time when they could apply the same treatment to their authors. Even before their alliance with Constantine had put the resources of the State at their disposal, they had contrived to use the secular arm for this purpose. In several persecutions, notably that of Diocletian, which was probably the most severe of them all, the Christian scriptures were particularly sought for by the Inquisitors of the State, and many of the orthodox boasted that they had arranged that the police should find the writings of the heretics in their stead[42]. Later, when it came to the turn of the Christians to dictate imperial edicts, the possession of heretical writings was made punishable with severe penalties[43]. Between orthodox Christian and Pagan it is a wonder that any have survived to us.

A lucky chance, however, has prevented us from being entirely ignorant of what the Gnostics had to say for themselves. In 1851, a MS. which had been known to be in the British Museum since 1778, was published with a translation into a curious mixture of Latin and Greek by the learned Petermann, and turned out to include a sort of Gospel coming from some early Gnostic sect[44]. From a note made on it by a writer who seems to have been nearly contemporary with its scribes, it is known as Pistis Sophia or “Faith-Wisdom”; and the same MS. also contains fragments of other works coming from a cognate source. In 1891, a papyrus in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which had been brought into this country in 1769 by the traveller Bruce, was also published with a French translation by M. Amélineau, an ex-Abbé who has long made the later Egyptian language his peculiar study, and proved to contain two documents connected with the system disclosed in the Pistis Sophia[45]. Both MSS. are in Coptic of the dialect of the Sahid or Upper Egypt, to which fact they probably owe their escape from the notice of the Byzantine Inquisitors; and they purport to contain revelations as to the next world and the means of attaining salvation therein made by Jesus on His return to earth after the Resurrection. Although these several documents were evidently not all written at one time and

place, and cannot be assigned to a single author, the notes and emendations appearing on the MSS. show that most of them must have been in the possession of members of the same school as their composers; and that therefore we have here for the first time direct and authentic evidence of the Gnostic tenets, as put forward by their adherents instead of by their opponents.

The collation of these documents with the excerpts from other Gnostic writings appearing in early writers like Clement of Alexandria who were not professed heresiologists[46], shows that the postChristian Gnostic sects had more opinions in common than would be gathered from the statements of St Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, and that they probably fulfilled a real want of the age[47].

All of them seem to have held that there was one Supreme Being, the source of all good, and that matter was inherently malignant and opposed to him. All of them, too, seem to have taught the perfectibility of man’s nature, the salvation of at any rate the majority of mankind, and the possibility of their rising in the scale of being; and all of them held that this was to be effected mainly by means of certain mysteries or sacramental rites which were assumed to have a magical efficacy. All these fundamental characteristics find their origin in the beliefs of the pre-Christian religions and religious associations described above, and doubtless owed much to their influence. But with these, there was now combined for the first time the recognition of the divinity of One who, while appearing upon earth as a man among men, was yet thought by all to be endowed with a greater share of the Divine nature than they. Orpheus, Moses, Homer, and the Jewish prophets had in turn been claimed as religious teachers who were divinely inspired; but Jesus was asserted by every later Gnostic school of whose teachings we have any evidence to have been Himself of higher essence and substance than the rest of mankind[48]. How far this assertion was dictated by the necessity for finding a superhuman authority for the revelation which each Gnostic leader professed to make to his disciples may be open to question; but in view of some contemporary controversies it is well to draw attention to the fact that the Divinity in some shape or other of Jesus, as well as what is now called His “historicity,” was never for a moment called in question during the first three centuries

by Gnostic or Catholic. Μονογενής or Monogenes[49]—a word which Catholic writers later confused with Μονογεννητός or “onlybegotten,” but which is best represented by the corresponding Latin expression unicus or “unique” (i.e. one of a kind)—is the word in which the Gnostics summed up their conceptions of the nature of Jesus[50].

This belief, however, led to consequences which do not at first sight seem to follow from it. The gods of classical antiquity were indeed supposed to be of like passions with ourselves, and the Greek of Homer’s time never thought it shame to attribute to them jealousy or lust or fear or vanity or any other of the weaknesses which afflict us[51]. But the one feature besides their beauty that distinguished the Greek gods from humanity was their immortality or freedom from death; and if demigods like Heracles were said to have gone through the common experience of mortals, this was held as proof that their apotheosis or deification did not take place until they had left the earth[52]. So much was this the case that the Greeks are said to have been much amused when they first beheld the Egyptians wailing for the death of Osiris, declaring that if he were a god he could not be dead, while if he were not, his death was not to be lamented[53]; and Plutarch, when repeating the story to his countrymen, thought it necessary to explain that in his view the protagonists in the Osiris and Set legend were neither gods nor men, but “great powers” or daemons not yet deified and in the meantime occupying a place between the two[54]. The same difficulty was, perhaps, less felt by the other Mediterranean peoples, among whom, as we have seen, the idea of a god who died and rose again was familiar enough[55]; but the Gnostic leaders must always have had before their eyes the necessity of making Christianity acceptable to persons in possession of that Hellenistic culture which then dominated the world, and which still forms the root of all modern civilization. How, then, were they to account for the fact that their God Jesus, whether they considered Him as the Logos or Word of Philo, or the Monogenes or Unique Power of the Supreme Being, had suffered a shameful death by sentence of the Roman procurator in Judaea?

The many different answers that they gave to this question showed more eloquently than anything else the difficulties with which it was surrounded. Simon, according to Hippolytus, said that Jesus only appeared on earth as a man, but was not really one, and seemed to have suffered in Judaea, although he had not really done so[56].

Basilides the Egyptian, the leader of another sect, held, according to Irenaeus, that the body of Jesus was a phantasm and had no real existence, Simon of Cyrene having been crucified in his stead[57]; while Hippolytus, who seems to have drawn his account of Basilides’ teaching from a different source from that used by his predecessor, makes him say that only the body of Jesus suffered and relapsed into “formlessness[58],” but that His soul returned into the different worlds whence it was drawn. Saturninus, another heresiarch, held, according to both authors, to the phantasmal theory of Jesus’ body, which attained such popularity among other Gnostic sects that “Docetism,” as the opinion was called, came to be looked upon by later writers as one of the marks of heresy[59], and Hippolytus imagines that there were in existence sects who attached such importance to this point that they called themselves simply Docetics[60]. Valentinus, from whose teaching, as we shall see, the principal system of the Pistis Sophia was probably derived, also adhered to this Docetic theory, and said that the body of Jesus was not made of human flesh, but was constructed “with unspeakable art” so as to resemble it, the dove-like form which had descended into it at His baptism leaving it before the Crucifixion[61]. According to Irenaeus, too, Valentinus held that the Passion of Jesus was not intended as an atonement or sacrifice for sin, as the Catholics taught, but merely as a symbol or reflection of something that was taking place in the bosom of the Godhead[62].

Another point in which the chief post-Christian Gnostic sects seem to have resembled one another is the secrecy with which their teachings were surrounded. Following strictly the practice of the various mysteries—the Eleusinian, the Isiac, Cabiric, and others—in which the Mediterranean god, whether called Dionysos, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, or by any other name, was worshipped, none were admitted to a knowledge of their doctrines without undergoing a long, arduous, and expensive course of initiation. More than one Gnostic

teacher is said to have told his hearers to conceal from men what they were, or in other words not to let it be known that they were affiliated to the sect[63], and all the Fathers bear witness to the way in which in time of persecution the Gnostics escaped by professing any faith that would satisfy the Roman authorities. By doing so, they laid themselves open to the accusation hurled at them with great virulence by the Church, that their secret rites and doctrines were so filthy as to shock human nature if made public—an accusation which at the first appearance of Christianity had been brought against the Catholics, and which the Church has ever since made use of against any sect which has differed from her, repeating it even at the present day against the Jews and the Freemasons[64]. There is, however, no reason why the accusation should be better founded in one case than in the others; and it is plain in any event that the practice of secrecy when expedient followed directly from the magical ideas which have been shown above to be the foundation of the dogmas of all the pre-Christian Gnostics, besides permeating religions like that of the Alexandrian divinities. The willingness of the post-Christian Gnostics to subscribe to any public profession of faith that might be convenient was no doubt due to the same cause[65]. As has been well said, to the true Gnostic, Paganism, Christianity, and Mahommedanism are merely veils[66]. The secret words and formulas delivered, and the secret rites which the initiate alone knows, are all that is necessary to assure him a distinguished place in the next world; and, armed with these, he can contemplate with perfect indifference all outward forms of worship.

These and other points which the post-Christian Gnostic sects seem to have had in common[67] can therefore be accounted for by their common origin, without accepting the theory of the textual critics that the Fathers had been deceived by an impostor who had made one document do duty several times over. Yet until we have the writings of the heresiarchs actually in our hands, we must always be in doubt as to how far their opinions have been correctly recorded for us. The post-Christian Gnostic sects have been compared with great aptness to the Protestant bodies which have sprung up outside the Catholic Church since the German Reformation[68], and the analogy in most respects seems to be perfect. Yet it would probably be extremely

difficult for a bishop of the Church of Rome or of that of England to give within the compass of an heresiology like those quoted above an account of the tenets of the different sects in England and America, without making grave and serious mistakes in points of detail. The difficulty would arise from want of first-hand knowledge, in spite of the invention of printing having made the dissemination of information on such subjects a thousand times more general than in sub-Apostolic times, and of the fact that the modern sects, unlike their predecessors, do not seek to keep their doctrines secret. But the analogy shows us another cause of error. The “Free Churches,” as they are called in modern parlance, have from the outset shown themselves above all things fissiparous, and it is enough to mention the names of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Socinus, Wesley, and Chalmers to show how hopelessly at variance the teachings of the founders of sects at first sight are. But in spite of this, there seems to have been always a sort of fluidity of doctrine among them, and hardly any of the Nonconformist sects now profess the dogmas with which they first came into existence. The changes in this respect, however, never involve the borrowing of new tenets from sources external to them all, but seem to be brought about by a sort of interfiltration between one sect and another. Thus, for example, for many centuries after the Reformation the majority of the dissident sects which rejected all connection with the Catholic Church were among the stoutest defenders of the Divinity of Jesus, and the Socinians who held the contrary opinion were in an entirely negligible minority.

At the present day, however, the tendency seems to run the other way, and many Nonconformist bodies are leaning towards Unitarian doctrines, although few of them probably have ever heard the name of Socinus. A similar tendency to interpenetration of doctrines early showed itself among the Gnostics; and there can be little doubt that it sometimes led to a fusion or amalgamation between sects of widely differing origin. Hence it is not extraordinary that certain tenets are sometimes recorded by the Fathers as peculiar to one Gnostic leader and sometimes to another, and to trace accurately their descent, it would be necessary to know the exact point in the history of each sect at which such tenets appeared. But the Fathers seldom thought of distinguishing between the opinions of an

heresiarch and those of his successors, and the literary habits of the time were not in favour of accurate quotation of documents or even of names[69]. This forms the chief difficulty in dealing with the history of the Gnostic teaching, and although the discovery of fresh documents contemporary with those we now possess would undoubtedly throw additional light upon the subject, it is probable that it will never be entirely overcome.

Generally speaking, however, Gnosticism played a most important part in the history of Christianity. Renan’s view that it was a disease which, like croup, went near to strangling the infant Church is often quoted[70]; but in the long run it is probable that Gnosticism was on the whole favourable to her development. In religion, sentiment often plays a larger part than reason; and any faith which would enable men of weight and influence to continue the religious practices in which they had been brought up, with at the outset but slight modification, was sure of wide acceptance. There seems no doubt that the earlier Gnostics continued to attend the mysteries of the Chthonian deities in Greece and of their Oriental analogues, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and the like elsewhere, while professing to place upon what they there saw a Christian interpretation[71]. Here they acted like the little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump, and this did much to spread the knowledge of the new faith among those spirituallyminded Gentiles, who would never have felt any interest in Christianity so long as it remained merely a branch of Judaism[72].

Most of them, moreover, sooner or later abandoned their Gnosticism, and became practising members of the Catholic Church, who sometimes went a long way to meet them. As Renan has said, none of them ever relapsed into Paganism[73], and in this way the so-called heresies became at once the feeders of orthodox Christianity and its richest recruiting-ground[74]. They offered in fact an easy road by which the wealthy, the learned, and the highly-placed could pass from Paganism to Christianity without suffering the inconvenience imposed upon the first followers of the Apostles.

On the other hand, it may be argued that the Church in receiving such recruits lost much of that simplicity of doctrine and practice to which it had hitherto owed her rapid and unvarying success. The

Gnostics brought with them into their new faith the use of pictures and statues, of incense, and of all the paraphernalia of the worship of the heathen gods. Baptism which, among the Jewish community in which Christianity was born, was an extremely simple rite, to be performed by anybody and entirely symbolical in its character[75], became an elaborate ceremony which borrowed the name as well as many of the adjuncts of initiation into the Mysteries. So, too, the Agape (love-feast) or common meal, which in pre-Christian times was, as we have seen, common to all Greek religious associations unconnected with the State, was transformed by the Gnostics into a rite surrounded by the same provisions for secrecy and symbolizing the same kind of sacrifice as those which formed the central point of the mystic drama at Eleusis and elsewhere. Both these sacraments, as they now came to be called, were thought to be invested with a magical efficacy, and to demand for their proper celebration a priesthood as exclusive as, and a great deal more ambitious than, that of Eleusis or Alexandria. The daring speculations of the Gnostics as to the nature of the godhead and the origin of the world also forced upon the Catholics the necessity of formulating her views on these points and making adhesion to them a test of membership[76]. To do so was possibly to choose the smaller of two evils, yet it can hardly be denied that the result of the differences of opinion thus aroused was to deluge the world with blood and to stay the progress of human knowledge for more than a thousand years[77]. It is said that if Gnosticism had not been forcibly suppressed, as it was directly the Christian priesthood obtained a share in the government of the State, Christianity would have been nothing but a battle-ground for warring sects, and must have perished from its own internal dissensions. It may be so; but it is at least as possible that, if left unmolested, many of the wilder sects would soon have withered away from their own absurdity, and that none of the others would have been able to endure for long. In this respect also, the history of the post-Reformation sects offers an interesting parallel.

Be that as it may, it is plain that the Catholic Church, in devoting her energies to the suppression of the Gnostic heresies, lost much of the missionary power which till then had seemed all-conquering. During

the two centuries which elapsed between the siege of Jerusalem under Vespasian and the accession of Aurelian, the Church had raised herself from the position of a tiny Jewish sect to that of the foremost among the many religions of the Roman Empire. A brief but bloody persecution under Diocletian convinced the still Pagan Emperors of the impossibility of suppressing Christianity by force, and the alliance which they were thus driven to conclude with it enabled the Church to use successfully against the Gnostics the arm which had proved powerless against the Catholics[78]. Yet the triumph was a costly one, and was in its turn followed by a schism which rent the Church in twain more effectually than the Gnostic speculations could ever have done. In the West, indeed, the Latin Church was able to convert the barbarians who extinguished the Western half of the Roman Empire; but in the East, Christianity had to give way to a younger and more ardent faith. How far this was due to the means taken by the Church to suppress Gnosticism must still be a matter of speculation, but it is certain that after her first triumph over heresy she gained no more great victories.

CHAPTER VIII POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: THE OPHITES Although the Ophites were one of the most widely-spread and in some respects the most interesting of the heretical sects which came to light after the foundation of the Christian Church, we know nothing at first hand about their origin. Philastrius, or Philaster of Brescia, writing about 380 A.D., includes them among those “who taught heresies before the Coming of Christ[79]”; but the phrase does not perhaps bear its apparent meaning, and the late date at which he wrote makes it unlikely that he possessed any exclusive evidence on the point. A more plausible tradition, which is common to St Augustine[80], to the tractate Against All Heresies which passes under the name of Tertullian[81], and to the similar one attributed to St Jerome[82], is that the Ophites derived their doctrines from Nicolaus or Nicolas of Antioch, the deacon mentioned in the Acts[83], and that they are therefore alluded to under the name of Nicolaitans[84] in the address to the Church of Ephesus in the Canonical Apocalypse.

Origen, on the other hand, in his Discourse against Celsus says that they boasted of one Euphrates as their founder[85]; while Hippolytus declares that their tenets were said by themselves to be due to “the very numerous discourses which were handed down by James the brother of the Lord to Mariamne[86].” From which contradictory statements we may gather that the “heresy” of the Ophites was, even as early as 230 A.D., a very old one, which may have appeared even before Christianity began to show its power, and that it was probably born in Asia Minor and owed much to the Pagan religions there practised and little or nothing to any dominant personality as did the systems of Simon Magus and the heresies treated of in the succeeding chapters.

It is also probable that between the time when the Canonical Apocalypse was written and that of Origen and Hippolytus[87], the Ophites altered their doctrines more than once. We may not be able to go so far as their historian, Father Giraud, who thinks that he can distinguish between their earlier opinions, which he would attribute to the Naassenes or Ophites[88] described by Hippolytus, and those of a later school to which he would assign the name of Ophites specially[89]. Yet many of the Fathers confuse their doctrines with those of the Sethians, the Cainites, and other sects which seem to have had some distinguishing features[90]; while Hippolytus, who shows a more critical spirit than the other heresiologists, says expressly that the other heresies just named were little different in appearance from this one, being united by the same spirit of error[91].

The confusion is further increased by his statement that the Naassenes called themselves Gnostics, although Carpocrates’ followers, who must have been later in time, are elsewhere said to be the first to adopt this name[92]. For there was at least one other sect of heretics who did the same thing, and to whom Epiphanius in his Panarion attributes, together with a theological and cosmological system not unlike that hereafter described, mysteries of unnameable obscenity with which the Ophites were never charged[93]. In this respect it may be as well to remember the words of Tertullian that the heretics “know no respect even for their own leaders. Hence it is that schisms seldom happen among heretics because, even when they exist, they do not appear; for their very unity is schism. I am greatly in error,” he continues, “if they do not amongst themselves even diverge from their own rules, since every man, as it suits his own temper, modifies the traditions he has received after the same fashion as did he who handed them down to him, when he moulded them according to his own free will.... What was allowed to Valentinus is allowable to the Valentinians, and that is lawful for the Marcionites which Marcion did, i.e. to innovate on the faith according to his own judgment. In short, all heresies when investigated are found to be in many particulars disagreeing with their own authors[94].”

If Tertullian was right, it is idle to expect that after the lapse of nineteen centuries we can hope to distinguish between the opinions of an heresiarch and those of his followers who differed from or improved upon his teaching.

Of the country in which the Ophites first appeared, and where to the last they had their strongest following, there can, however, be little doubt. Phrygia, by which is meant the entire central part of Asia Minor or, to use its modern name, Anatolia, must from its situation have formed a great meeting-place for different creeds, among which that of the Jews occupied in the first centuries of our era a prominent place. Seleucus Nicator had followed the example of Alexander in Egypt in granting the Jews full rights of citizenship in all his cities, and Antiochus the Great took even more practical steps towards inducing them to settle there when he transported thither two thousand Jewish families from Mesopotamia and Babylon[95].

These Jews of the Eastern Diaspora or Dispersion had, however, by no means kept whole the faith of their forefathers, and there seems in consequence to have been less racial hatred between them and the earlier inhabitants of the country here than elsewhere[96]. In religious matters, these last, too, seem to have been little affected by the Euhemerism that had destroyed the faith of the more sophisticated Greeks, and the orgiastic worship of Cybele, Attis, and Sabazius found in Phrygia its principal seat. The tendency of the inhabitants towards religious hysteria was not likely to be lessened by the settlement in the centre of Asia Minor of the Celtic tribes known as the Galatae, who had gradually passed under the Roman yoke in the time of Augustus, but seem long to have retained their Celtic taste for innovations in religious matters, and to have supplied from the outset an endless number of heresies to the Church[97].

Moreover, in the Wars of Succession which followed the death of Alexander, Phrygia had been bandied about like a shuttlecock between Antigonus and Lysimachus; in the decadence of the Seleucid house, it had been repeatedly harried by the pretenders to the Syrian crown; and it had, during the temporary supremacy of Mithridates and his son-in-law Tigranes, been subject to the tyranny of the Armenians[98]. Thanks to the policy of these barbarian kings, it had in great measure been denuded of its Greek-speaking

inhabitants[99], the growth of its towns had been checked, and the country seems to have been practically divided among a crowd of dynasts or priest-kings, generally the high-priests of temples possessing vast landed estates and preserving their importance by the celebration of yearly festivals. Dr Mahaffy compares these potentates with the prince-bishops and lordly abbots produced by nearly the same conditions in mediaeval Europe[100], and Sir William Ramsay’s and Mr Hogarth’s researches of late years in Anatolia have shown how much truth there is in the comparison.

The religion practised by these priest-kings throughout the whole of Asia Minor differed slightly in form, but was one in substance[101]. It was in effect the worship of the bisexual and mortal gods whom we have already seen worshipped under varying names in the Eastern basin of the Mediterranean. These deities, whose alternate appearance as male and female, infant and adult, could only be explained to Western ears as the result of incestuous unions, could all on final analysis be reduced to one great divinity in whom all Nature was contained. The essence of the Anatolian religion, says Sir William Ramsay, when describing the state of things that existed in Phrygia immediately before the preaching of St Paul, was “the adoration of the life of Nature—that life apparently subject to death, yet never dying, but reproducing itself in new forms, different and yet the same. This perpetual self-identity under varying forms, this annihilation of death through the power of self-reproduction, was the object of an enthusiastic worship, characterized by remarkable self-abandonment and immersion in the divine, by a mixture of obscene symbolism and sublime truths, by negation of the moral distinctions and family ties that exist in a more developed society, but do not exist in the free life of Nature. The mystery of self-reproduction, of eternal unity amid temporary diversity, is the key to explain all the repulsive legends and ceremonies that cluster round that worship, and all the manifold manifestations or diverse embodiments of the ultimate single divine life that are carved on the rocks of Asia Minor[102].”

Whether the Phrygians of Apostolic times actually saw all these sublime ideas underlying the religion of their country may be doubted; but it is fairly certain that at the time in question there was worshipped throughout Anatolia a divine family comprising a goddess known as the Mother of the Gods, together with a male deity, who was at once her son, her spouse, her brother, and sometimes her father[103]. The worship of this pair, who were in the last resort considered as one bisexual being, was celebrated in the form of festivals and mystery-plays like those of the Middle Ages, in which the birth, nuptials, death, and resurrection of the divinities were acted in dramatic form. At these festivals, the worshippers gave themselves up to religious excitement alternating between continence sometimes carried to the extent of self-mutilation on the part of the men, and hysterical or religious prostitution on the part of the women[104]. The gathering of foreign merchants and slaves in the Anatolian cities, and the constant shifting of their inhabitants by their successive masters, had forced on the votaries of these Phrygian deities a theocrasia of the most complete kind, and the Phrygian god and goddess were in turn identified with the deities of Eleusis, of whom indeed they may have been the prototypes, with the Syrian Aphrodite and Adonis, with the Egypto-Greek Serapis and Isis, and probably with many Oriental deities as well[105]. At the same time, their fame and their worship had spread far beyond Phrygia. The primitive statue of the goddess of Pessinus, a black stone or baetyl dignified by the name of the Mother of the Gods, was transported to Rome in the stress of the Second Punic War and there became the centre of a ritual served by eunuch priests supported by the State[106]; while, later, her analogue, the Syrian goddess, whose temple at Hierapolis, according to Lucian, required a personnel of over three hundred ministrants, became the object of the special devotion of the Emperor Nero[107]. As with the Alexandrian divinities, the respect paid to these stranger deities by the legions carried their worship into every part of the Roman world[108].

The element which the Jews of Asia contributed to Anatolian religion at this period was probably more important than has been generally supposed. M. Cumont’s theory that the epithet of the “Highest” (Ὕψιστος) often applied to the God of Anatolia and Syria really

covers the personality of Yahweh of Israel rests upon little proof at present[109]. It may be conceded that the tendency to monotheism— or to speak strictly their hatred for the worshippers of many gods— rooted in the Jews from the Captivity onwards may at first have done much to hasten the progress of the theocrasia which was welding all the gods of the Mysteries into one great God of Nature. But the Babylonian or Oriental Jews, called in the Talmud and elsewhere the Ten Tribes, probably had some inborn sympathy with the more or less exalted divinities of the West. Even in the temple of Jerusalem, Ezekiel sees in his vision “women weeping for Tammuz[110],” while Jeremiah complains of the Jews making cakes to the Queen of Heaven, which seems to be another name for the Mother of the Gods[111]. The feminine side of the Anatolian worship can therefore have come to them as no new thing. Perhaps it was due to this that they so soon fell away from their ancestral faith, and that, in the words of the Talmud, “the baths and wines of Phrygia separated the Ten Tribes from their brethren[112].” That their collection of money for the Temple in Roman times was due not so much to any religious motive, as to some of the financial operations in which the Jews were always engaging, Cicero hints with fair plainness in his Oration in defence of Flaccus[113]. They seem, too, to have intermarried freely with the Greek citizens, while the sons of these mixed marriages did not undergo the circumcision which the Jews of the Western Dispersion demanded not only from native Jews but also from proselytes of alien blood[114].

The Jews also brought with them into Phrygia superstitions or sidebeliefs to which they were probably much more firmly attached than to their national religion. The practice of magic had always been popular among the Chosen People as far back as the time of Saul, and the bowls inscribed with spells against enchantments and evil spirits form almost the only relics which they have left in the mounds which mark their settlement at Hilleh on the site of the ancient Babylon[115]. From this and other evidence, it would seem that the Babylonian Jews had borrowed from their Chaldaean captors many of their views as to the importance of the Name in magic, especially when used for the purposes of exorcism or of spells; that they thought the name of their national god Yahweh particularly

efficacious; and that the different names of God used in the Old Testament were supposed, according to a well-known rule in magic, to be of greater efficiency as the memory of their meaning and actual significance died out among them[116]. The Babylonian Jews, moreover, as is evident from the Book of Daniel, no sooner found themselves among the well-to-do citizens of a great city than they turned to the professional practice of divination and of those curious arts whereby they could make a living from the credulity of their Gentile neighbours without the manual labour always dreaded by them[117]. Hence Phrygia, like the rest of Asia Minor during the Apostolic Age, was full of strolling Jewish sorcerers who undertook for money to cast out devils, to effect and destroy enchantments, to send and interpret dreams, and to manufacture love philtres[118]. That in doing so they made great use of the name of their national deity seems plain from Origen’s remark that “not only do those belonging to the Jewish nation employ in their prayers to God and in the exorcising of demons the words: God of Abraham and God of Isaac and God of Jacob, but so also do most of those who occupy themselves with magical rites. For there is found in treatises on magic in many countries such an invocation of God and assumption of the divine name, as implies a familiar use of it by these men in their dealings with demons[119].” This is abundantly borne out by the spells preserved for us by the Magic Papyri before mentioned, where the expressions “God of Abraham,” “God of Isaac,” “God of Jacob” constantly occur. One spell given above contains, as we have seen, along with many unfamiliar expressions drawn from Greek, Persian, Egyptian, and even Sumerian sources, the words “Blessed be the Lord God of Abraham[120],” and in nearly every one do we find the Tetragrammaton or four-lettered name of God transliterated in the A.V. Jehovah, either with or without some of the other Divine names used in the Old Testament. The names of the angels Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael given in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha are also common in all this literature[121].

Did the Babylonian Jews bring with them into Phrygia any theory of the universe other than the direct and unfettered rule of Jehovah and the creation of the world from nothing, which they gathered from their sacred books? There is little evidence on the point, save some

expressions of doubtful import in the Magic Papyri[122] and the statement of Origen that “the name Sabaoth, and Adonai and the other names treated with so much reverence among the Hebrews ... belong to a secret theology which refers to the Framer of all things[123].” It might be possible to deduce from this that the elaborate system known as the Cabala or secret tradition of the Jews was already in existence[124]. This system, on its theoretical or speculative side, attempts to explain the existence of the physical universe by postulating a whole series of intermediate powers emanating from the Supreme Being of whom they are the attributes or names; while, on the other or “practical,” it professes to perform wonders and to reveal mysteries by a childish juggling with letters in the shape of anagrams and acrostics or with their numerical values[125]. As has been said above, follies of this last-named kind were unknown neither to the later Orphics nor to the primitive Church, and might well be thought to have been acquired by the Jews during their stay in Babylon, where the Semitic inhabitants seem from a very early date and for magical reasons to have used numbers instead of letters in writing the names of their gods[126]. It would not have been difficult for them to have acquired at the same time from the Persian masters of Babylon the doctrine of emanation instead of creation which is to be found in the Zend Avesta as well as in all the postChristian Gnostic systems. But there are other channels besides the Anatolian religion through which these ideas might have come into the West[127], and it will be better not to lay any stress upon this. That the Cabala in the complete form in which it appears in the books known as the Sepher Jetzirah and the Sepher Zohar does not go further back than the VIth or VIIth century of our era, seems to be the opinion of all those best qualified to judge in the matter. M. Isidore Loeb, who has given the most coherent and compact summary of Cabalistic teaching that has appeared of late years, finds its germs in Babylonian Judaism at about the same period which saw the blossoming of the Christian Gnostic sects, without going so far as to derive either of the later doctrines from the other[128].

However this may be, there is a fair consensus of opinion among the Fathers of the Church as to the doctrines current among those whom, for reasons to be presently seen, they called the Ophites or

worshippers of the Serpent. The aim of the sect seems to have been to produce an eclectic system which should reconcile the religious traditions current from time immemorial in Western Asia with the worship of the Hellenized gods of Asia Minor, and the teachings of the already powerful Christian Church. With this view they went back to what is probably the earliest philosophical theory of the origin of the universe, and declared that before anything was, there existed God, but God conceived as an infinite ocean of divinity, too great and too remote to be apprehended by man’s intelligence, of whom and of whose attributes nothing could be known or said, and who could only be likened to a boundless sea. Something like this was the view of the earliest inhabitants of Babylonia, who declared that before heaven or earth or the gods came into being there was nothing but a vast waste of waters[129]. At some time or another, the same idea passed into Egypt, when the Egyptians attributed the beginning of things to Nu or the primaeval deep[130]; and it was probably the spread of this tradition into Ionia which induced Thales of Miletus, the earliest of the Ionian philosophers, to assert that water was the first of all things[131]. This unknowable and inaccessible power, the Ophites declared to be ineffable or impossible to name, and he was only referred to by them as Bythos or the Deep. The same idea and the same name were adopted by most of the later Gnostics[132].

From this unknowable principle or Father (Πατὴρ ἄγνωστος) there shone forth, according to the Ophites, a Primordial Light, infinite and incorruptible, which is the Father of all things subsequent to him[133].

Here they may have been inspired, not by the Babylonian, but by its derivative, the Jewish tradition given in the Book of Genesis[134]. But this Light was in effect, though not in name, the chief god of their system, and in Asia Minor the gods had never perhaps been imagined as existing in any but human form. Accordingly they described this Light as the First Man, meaning thereby no terrestrial creature, but a heavenly or archetypal man in whose likeness mankind was afterwards made[135]. From him came forth a second Light sometimes called his Ennoia or Thought, which expression seems to cover the idea that this Second Man or Son of Man, by both which names he was known to the Ophites, was not begotten in the ordinary way of mortals, but was produced from the First Man as

a thought or concept is formed in the brain[136]. Or we may, to take another metaphor, regard this Ennoia as the rays of light which emanate or flow forth from a lamp or other source of light, but which have no independent existence and still remain connected with their parent. Such was the Ophite idea with regard to the two great Lights or the First and Second Man whom they refused to consider as separate, giving them both the name of Adamas, or the Unconquered, a classical epithet of the Hades already identified at Eleusis with Dionysos[137]. They also called them, as will be seen later, the Father-and-Son. In this, perhaps, they did not go outside the conception of the Anatolian religion, which always represented the Divine Son as the spouse of the goddess who gave him birth, and in this way eternally begetting himself. Thus, the Phrygian goddess Cybele under the name of Agdistis was said to be violently enamoured of Atys who was in effect her own son[138]. The same idea was familiar to the Egyptians, among whom more than one god is described as the “bull (i.e. male or husband) of his mother,” and it may thus have passed into the Alexandrian religion, where Horus was, as we have seen, often given instead of Osiris as the lover of Isis[139]. At Eleusis it was more modestly concealed under the myth which made Dionysos or Hades at once the ravisher of Persephone and her son by Zeus in serpent form—a myth which is summed up in the mystic phrase preserved by Clement of Alexandria that “The bull is the father of the serpent, and the serpent the father of the bull[140].”

Thus the Ophites accounted for the divinity who was in effect their Supreme God, the still higher Bythos, as we have seen, being put in the background as too awful for human consideration[141]. But it was still necessary to make manifest the feminine aspect of the deity which was always very prominent in Asia Minor. The Mother of the Gods, known as Ma in Lydia, Cybele in Phrygia proper, Artemis at Ephesus, the unnamed Syrian goddess at Hierapolis, and Aphrodite in Cyprus and elsewhere[142], was in the early Christian centuries the most prominent person in the Anatolian pantheon, a fact which Sir William Ramsay would attribute to the matriarchate, Mutterrecht, or custom of descent in the female line, which he thinks indigenous to Asia Minor. In the earliest Phrygian religion there seems little doubt that the supreme goddess was originally considered to be bisexual,

and capable of production without male assistance, as is expressly stated in the legend of Agdistis or Cybele preserved by Pausanias[143], and perhaps hinted at in the stories of Amazons spread throughout the whole of Asia Minor. But it is probable that, as Sir William Ramsay himself says, this idea had become less prominent with the immigration from Europe of tribes of male warriors without female companions,[144] while Semitic influence was always against it. Hence the Ophites found themselves compelled to make their female deity inferior or posterior to their male. “Below these, again (i.e. below the First and Second Man or Father-andSon),” says Irenaeus in reporting their doctrines, “is the Holy Spirit ... whom they call the First Woman[145].” Neither he nor Hippolytus gives us any direct evidence of the source whence this feminine Power was thought by them to have issued. But Hippolytus says without circumlocution that “this Man,” i.e. Adamas or the Father-and-Son, “is both male and female[146],” and he quotes the words of an Ophite hymn[147] addressed to him that: “From thee is Father and through thee is Mother, two names immortal, parents of Aeons, O thou citizen of heaven, Man of mighty name[148]!” Later, he puts in the mouth of the Naassene or Ophite writer from whom he repeatedly quotes, the phrase: “The Spirit is where the Father and the Son are named, from whom and from the Father it is there born; and this (that is, the Spirit) is the many-named, myriad-eyed Incomprehensible One for whom every nature in different ways yearns,” or in other words the soul or animating principle of Nature[149]. It therefore seems that the first Ophites made their Supreme God a triad like the Eleusinian, the Alexandrian, and the Anatolian, consisting of three persons two of whom were males and the third a female, or a Father, Mother, and Son, of whom the Son was but another and renewed form of the Father, while the union of all three was necessary to express every aspect of the Deity, who was nevertheless one in essence[150]. This threefold division of things, said the Ophites, ran through all nature “there being three worlds or universes: the angelic (that sent directly from God), the psychic, and